Play Book Tag discussion

3.4 stars, so rounded down

I suspect that part of the let down of the book was the very high ratings and numbers of stars. Another part is that it's fiction based on real animals, and I am not keen on this for animals or humans. There are some good things about this book, of course and I can see why it won an award. Reading this on the heels of Black Beauty (which I read a few days ago) made animal welfare a mini-theme for me this week. While I often enjoy the anthropomorphization of animals in fiction when the animals are also fictional, I have a difficult time when this is done with real animals. This dates far back to when I studied animal behaviour in university and is unlikely to change.

I am opposed to keeping animals in cages as was done with the real ones in these books and can see that this speaks to the current generation of children the way Black Beauty did in the 19th century and still does today.